On 1/11/12 10:26 AM, ben wrote: Griswold's SNOBOL archive at the University of Arizona was archived.

In the discussion of BASIC, various "improved" BASICs have been mentioned, on various 1980's microcomputer platforms, leaving the impression perhaps that the improvements to BASIC were a phenomenon of that period and arena. The BASIC on the Microdata-REALITY system had many of these improvements back in the mid-70's, on a professional/business/mini- computer platform: structured if-then-else, statement numbers are optional, indentable, etc. Below is a code snippet from a program I wrote in 1977/8 (the numbers on the far left are line numbers, not part of the source). There was also a 'LOOP-statement-WHILE/UNTIL-condition-DO-statement- REPEAT' facility. I don't remember whether procedures/subroutines were provided for or not. This was a compiled BASIC as I recall. So when did the structuring of BASIC begin? Are there earlier examples? Was the 'official' language definition improved or were they all independent developments? ======== I started out with basic BASIC on an HP9830 in 1976, although at the same time I was exposed to 8080/Z80 machine and assembly language. A couple years later in 1st-year university the prof declared at the beginning of the year we would be learning ALGOL. I had the impertinence to ask him why we wouldn't be using BASIC. He had a very short answer for me. I soon saw the light. ========= 58 *********************** 59 * PRINTING LOOPS 60 300 PRINTER ON 61 LL(1)=PN; LL(2)=FN 62 FOR P=1 TO P2 63 IF P=1 THEN H='(PROGRAMS)'; NP=2 ELSE H='(FILES) '; NP=1 64 PGE=0; LNE=0 65 * 66 FOR LC(1)=1 TO LL(P) 67 * 68 DA=''; M=0 69 FOR LC(2)=1 TO LL(NP) 70 IF EXTRACT(FA,2,LC(NP),LC(P)+1)=1 THEN M=M+1; DA=INSERT(DA,M,0,0EXTRACT(FA,NP,LC(2),1)) 71 NEXT LC(2) 72 * 73 M=INT(M/2+0.5) 74 LNE=LNE+M 75 IF LNE>60 OR PGE=0 THEN 76 PGE=PGE+1; LNE=M+3 77 PRINT PC 78 PRINT 'PROGRAM - FILE CROSS REFERENCE':SPACE (29):TIMEDATE()[11,11] 79 PRINT H:SPACE(55):'PAGE ':PGE L2 80 END 81 * 82 PRINT U; PRINT; LNE=LNE+3 83 T=EXTRACT(FA,P,LC(1),1):':' 84 PRINT T L22:S3: 85 FOR D=1 TO M 86 PRINT EXTRACT(DA,D,0,0) L22:S3:EXTRACT(DA,M+D,0,0) L22 87 PRINT S25: 88 NEXT D 89 PRINT 90 IF M=0 THEN PRINT 91 * 92 NEXT LC(1) 93 NEXT P 94 STOP 95 *********************** 96 * ERROR MESSAGE 97 900 PRINT; PRINT "ERROR ":ERR:" HAS OCCURRED IN PROGRAM 'X'" 98 END

On 2012 Jan 11, at 7:04 PM, Gene Buckle wrote: Well, I couldn't really say .. 1978 was about the last time I used the Microdata/Pick system. IIRC, EXTRACT() was used to access the fields in a record, the record perhaps having been READ() from the database; I don't recall the exact semantics. Would it make sense if it were something like: value = EXTRACT( record, index1, index2, index3 ) I never saw the x<a,b,c> notation .. syntactic shorthand introduced later?

On 2012 Jan 12, at 7:30 AM, Gene Buckle wrote: I liked working on the Microdata-Reality/Pick system at the time, albeit as someone quite young and inexperienced. Working and programming with the database seemed quite effective for the nature of the work (business/accounting). The wikipedia article on the Pick system mentions files being structured with items, attributes, values and sub-values, which would fit with: value = EXTRACT( item, attribute, value, sub-value ) so as you surmised it looks like EXTRACT and <> are equivalent.

On 11/01/12 1:48 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Its successor (more or less), Icon, is actually quite interesting. http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/ --Toby

On 12 Jan 2012 at 23:37, Michael Richter wrote: That may be true, but when I used SNOBOL4, it was on a S/360 machine and catastrophic error messages always came from the FORTRAN routines. Now you've made me go search my my book... Okay, look at page 171 in the GPP 1968 SNOBOL4 book. Note that it mentions FORTRAN I/O routines. Or page 163, where it's mentioned that input is read from FT05F001--the FORTRAN standard data set. I suspect SNOBOL4 (or at least S/360 SNOBOL4) was more of a mongrel, with perhaps some of the parser and interpreter written in SIL, but called from a FORTRAN mainline program. And there were several versions of SNOBOL4. The one the book concerns itself with was 2.0. There was the 1964 SNOBOL and the 1966 SNOBOL3. Was there ever a SNOBOL2? It might be fun to revisit SNOBOL after 40-odd years. It was something of a hog on a S360/40 back then. It'd probably run like the wind on a low-end consumer PC today. --Chuck

On 12 Jan 2012 at 10:59, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Do these help? ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/snobol/ http://www.snobol4.org/doc/arizona/index.html --Chuck

On 13 January 2012 02:10, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: This is because the *I/O routines* were Fortran's. They linked to Fortran libraries for I/O, in short. And all of them were written in SIL and (on the '360!) used Fortran's I/O routines. Note that, though: *just* the I/O routines. If you can acquire the book on the implementation (it's "out there" in electronic form) it's actually quite an interesting read. Griswold doesn't disguise his missteps and misfeatures at all. If anything he's occasionally too harsh on himself. Not that was ever released, no. From what I gathered SNOBOL came out, then was constantly incrementally modified into a glorious mess and that whole process is kind of viewed as "SNOBOL2". When they decided on a ground-up rewrite they called it SNOBOL3. Or something like that. Memory is hazy. I have a cheap laptop here and can, according to CSNOBOL's timing utility, pump about 2.5 million operations per second. I'm pretty sure a '360 couldn't do that? :D -- "Perhaps people don't believe this, but throughout all of the discussions of entering China our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese people. It's not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot." --Sergey Brin, demonstrating the emptiness of the "don't be evil" mantra.